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(subtle music) - Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival, I'm Michael Harriot.

And today we'll be talking with Heather McGhee, the author of "The Sum of Us" the book that I always wanted to exist, but I could never find anybody willing to write it.

We finally have, so everyone welcome Heather McGhee.

- (laughs) I love that.

- It's really true, right?

So years ago I actually taught a class that they allowed me to create called race as an economic construct.

And you had to basically create your own material.

And I wish this book had existed then, but it exists now.

So, and I'm really eager to get into it.

But one thing I always like to start with, because I think it tells you a lot about people is where are you from?

And how many, if any sisters and brothers did you grow up with.

- (laughs) Thank you Michael.

Well, I'm a huge fan of yours.

Thanks to the Crosscut Festival for bringing us together.

I'm so excited for this conversation.

I grew up in Chicago, and I had two older, one older half brother and two younger half sisters, and so I'm like the oldest, you know, on one piece 'cause it's like my dad this way and my mom this way.

So I'm like the oldest of my dad's kids and I'm the youngest of my mom's kids, and I'm also a middle kid, so yeah.

- So you have it all.

- Yeah.

- All that stuff.

And so I'm really ready to dig into the book.

It is quite a work.

So what made you write it?

Write the book, and who did you write it for?

- You, obviously Michael.

- Besides me.

(Heather laughing) - So I wrote the book out of similar sense of frustration that, you know, I'd been working for nearly 20 years in economic policy, helping to build and then running a think tank called Demo, which focuses on inequality in our economy and our democracy.

And as part of sort of the broad movement, looking to advance solutions to inequality, we were doing what we're supposed to do, right?

We were doing the statistical analysis.

We were bringing the facts and evidence and, you know, sort of policy modeling to the policymakers and hoping that in the face of rising inequality year after year, they were going to sort of reverse course and do the right thing.

You know, raise wages, extend healthcare, cancel student debt, refund public college, and they kept not doing it.

And there kept being something that was sort of an undercurrent that we didn't really have the sort of permission structure to fully name for most of my career in public policy.

And we didn't really have a thorough understanding of exactly how it was impacting us, and so really this book was born out of a lot of conversations across the movement for social change, where I'd talk to environmentalist or I'd talk to labor unions, or I'd talk to people who want to move universal childcare or universal health care, and there wasn't a coherent story for why it was so hard in our country, right?

Why as opposed to our more homogenous peer nations, we couldn't simply like do the basics for our people.

The opening line of the book goes, do you ever wonder why it seems that we can't seem to have nice things in America?

And so I ended up a year and a half into the Trump administration, leaving my dream job, running a think tank and setting out on a number of trips across the country from California to Maine, and Mississippi and back again, and talking to hundreds of people, kind of putting aside the knowledge that I had as someone who works in economic policy, and as a lawyer and picking up history books.

And so talking to sociologists and public opinion and political science, and what I've learned kind of early in my journey was that there's this zero sum concept to this idea that there's a fixed pie of rights and gains and progress for people of color has to come at white folks expense.

This is an idea that is held much more commonly by white people.

It's a sort of lie that has been sold to white people generation after generation.

It's not as much held by us.

We black and brown folks don't seem to think that progress for us has to come at white folks expense, but it helped to explain why, despite all of the data, all of the research, we simply weren't able to make progress on really most of our biggest challenges in the era that I've been alive.

- And I love the chapter on the zero sum theory.

It's one of the things that I've harped on forever.

And one of the things, first of all, who does it like pie and who doesn't want everybody to have pie?

But one of the themes I think of this book is the interconnectedness of all of us, right?

Like, you know, the name of the book, the sum of all of us, right.

And that, you know, when we invest in infrastructure in, you know, all of the things to eliminate inequality, how it doesn't just affect the people who we send the money to, but it comes back to us.

And that's one of the things that I thought was first of all, incredible about the book.

And I'd like you to talk about them in terms of how, first of all, it's not giving anybody something.

It is as you know, you repeatedly refer to it in the book as investing, right?

How it is investing in a community that we're all a part of.

- Yeah.

I mean, so I was born in 1980, right.

So all the politics that I've ever known has been under this paradigm of, you know, sort of anti-government, really degrading and disdaining social spending, a lot of kind of demonization and racialization of poverty.

And that didn't used to be the case in the United States.

First of all, that was, you know, of course you write a book there's so many surprises.

That was one of the many surprises, was just how much the country and particularly white Americans had a totally different ethos and love big government before the civil rights movement, we'll come back to that in a second.

But the idea that because there's not an us and them, and we are in an interconnected society, what we do to ensure the security and economic freedom and dynamism of some part of our society, we're downs to the benefits of the rest of society, particularly those who currently don't have enough.

And for most of my lifetime the sort of political narrative has been rich people should always have more money, in terms of tax cuts, but poor people, you know, shouldn't have more money because they would like to do something bad with it or something I dunno, right.

Rich people having more money is good for the economy, but working class people and people who are struggling to make ends meet, don't need any more money, don't deserve it, right.

It's really this expression of an under lying belief in a hierarchy of human value.

And really that hierarchy of human value of course, is quite racialized in the United States.

The zero-sum racial hierarchy was a lie and a story, a narrative created in order to justify our first economic model and society of stolen people and stolen land and stolen labor.

And in order to lure most white Americans into choosing their race rather than their class, and that has been really the story ever since.

And so when we think about the reason why I try to talk about public goods and investments, and you know, and again, I finished this book in November before, you know, the American jobs plan and infrastructure week became like a real thing that the president actually wanted to do.

You know, I see so many things as infrastructure because they are the assets, the services, the goods that make all other economic work possible and make it better.

So whether that's care, right.

Which, you know, as Ai-Jen Poo the head of the National Domestic Workers always says, so beautifully care is the work that makes all other work possible, or it is, you know, the ability to have a well-funded school or childcare or healthcare, or, you know, like be able to keep the lights on when a storm comes through Texas, for example, you know all of these examples.

- So how do you think that, why do you think first of all that it persists and how do you dismantle that zero sum thinking?

Do you think it is with logic and economic education?

Or do you think the people who perpetuate this will once they see the illogic of it will give it up?

Or do you think that it is fueled by race and race is the thing that perpetuates the (indistinct)?

- So I think the people that fuel it are the people who are selling this zero-sum idea for their own profit.

And to be very clear, I hope that throughout the book, I'm clear, I went to great pains to try to sort of distinguish at least for the sake of kind of getting your arms around the concept, that everything we believe comes from a story we've been told, and that it has been in the narrow financial self-interest of very pretty tiny elite that has been responsible over history for over the course of history for promulgating this idea and broadcasting it, you know, through media, through politics, through the kind of communication that goes on by shaping laws to reflect this belief in a hierarchy of human value and zero-sum, you know, and today it is very much being driven by a self-interested political elite that is, you know, sort of desperately trying to maintain power when their economic ideology and their sort of social ideology is pretty bankrupt.

And so that is what we see, right?

And now they've got, you know, huge media network they got, you know, social media, right?

There are so many tools at their disposal, but ultimately we're talking about people selling the zero-sum live for their own profit, and then people, you know, a much larger group of people who are buying it, who are in many ways desperate enough to buy it, are familiar enough with the story because it's been passed down generation after generation.

But I think right now, I think in terms of your question, Michael, like, what's gonna make it stop.

Please make it stop.

And when's it gonna stop?

I definitely don't think it's gonna be a sort of, you know, benevolent surrender of a weapon that has been very, very successful for them over time, I think it is going to be people, the much larger group of white folks refusing to buy it because the cost is getting too high.

And it's not because they've read my book, it's because, and I like, you know, enumerate the cost it's because the country is breaking, It's because we are falling down and failing on the big challenges of our time.

Everybody knows that we are divided.

Everyone feels a certain degree of sort of anguish and shame around the state of the country left right and center.

And, you know, from a purely economic standpoint, the economic benefit of the racial bargain now 50 years into the inequality era, where we have four out of 10 adult workers not being paid enough to meet their basic needs, while 1% of the population owns as much wealth as the entire middle class, the economic benefit of the racial bargain is getting smaller and smaller.

Like we've been trying it this way for 50 years and it's not working.

And so the issues that I raised in the book, whether it's healthcare or the cost of college, or the falling power of labor and collective bargaining, or environmental degradation, and our unwillingness to act on climate change, are all examples of the cost of this underlying racism in our politics and our policy making.

- So, you mentioned this earlier, right?

you said it wasn't always this way.

And I wanted to kind of pin down what changed because we saw the things that this kind of racialized economic policy, you know, the things that it created was given, you know, kind of given to them somewhere between 1930s and the 1950s, right?

And so like, it wasn't that long ago, like their grandparents know how they got this stuff.

- Well, yeah.

- What I'm thinking is how did we get from there, them believing that not just that they built it themselves, but to do it again is wrong.

Like is not just a kind of gradual removal from that reality, it's the opposite.

Like they believe the opposite of the thing that built the middle-class, but it was really relatively just yesterday.

- Yeah.

I mean, Michael, you're referring to basically the formula that helped to build the great American middle-class right.

The greatest middle-class the world had ever seen, which was a formula that the majority of white folks turned their backs on after the civil rights movement.

And the way that I described that in the book is through the central metaphor of the drained public pool.

And this recounts the story, actually, your neighbor town of Montgomery, but it happened to all over the country.

And I think it's really important for people to know it wasn't just the Jim Crow segregated south, this was happening in Ohio and New Jersey and Washington State.

So what happened was in the 1930s and '40s, we went on the building boom in this country of grand resort style, public swimming pools.

And these were not the kind of swimming pools that I've ever known, they were like a thousand plus swimmers.

They were public, they were, you know, a lot of WPA projects, and they were reflective of a broader government ethos, that it was the government's job to take care an ever increasing standard of living in this country for our people, and, you know, it was reflected in the new deal, in the provision of social security, in the creation of wage and labor standards, in the massive subsidization of affordable housing, and then layering on top of that the creation of federally backed and insured mortgages to make home ownership possible for, you know, white working class folks who never thought that they would be able to own that wealth building, a piece of what would become the American dream through the GI bill, which, you know, put a generation of returning veterans to college for free and more home ownership grants, and virtually all that I just described as you know Micheal was for whites only, whether it was explicitly like in the housing subsidies, which, you know, said for Caucasians only, or it was race neutral, like the GI bill was on its face, but then was filtered through segregated housing and higher education sectors, right?

So left out tons of black veterans.

And the pools were often segregated too.

And when in the wake of brown, black families were finally able to sue and advocate and say, hey, those are our tax dollars.

We want our kids to be able to swim too, cities across the country decided to drain their public swimming pools rather than integrate them.

They literally drained out the water, backed up truckloads of dirt, paved it over in Montgomery, Alabama, where I go in the book, the central park there called Oak Park their closed the pool, they sold off the animals in the zoo.

They actually closed down the entire parks and recreation department of the city and kept it closed for a decade rather than integrate it.

So we were in 1970 before Montgomery reopened its parks and recreation department, and when they did that they never rebuilt the pools.

So I walked the grounds of the sort of big grassy expanse.

And there were like five people at the park, right.

It was no longer the lifeblood of the community, the way it had been.

And I talk about the drained pool as obviously standing in for so much more.

It's about what happened to public goods once they were expanded to include public that white people didn't think was good.

And what happened when public goods then became private cost and private amenities, right?

With the swimming pools, you had white folks building, you know, backyard swimming pools and membership only private swim clubs.

And of course that means a community lost out in something, you know, and then that's obviously been a big feature of the austerity of the inequality era.

It means black folks never got to swim in the public pools and meant rich white folks, you know, had something that was all to themselves.

But I then trace the drained pool politics of austerity that is fueled by a logic of racial resentment, a desire not to share across lines of race, to rather destroy something that is sort of prized in our country rather than share it across all of these issues.

That really for me helped explain more than anything else that undercurrent that I was talking about, the way that it was so hard to make progress on the economic issues that should have been kind of no-brainers and are no-brainers in countries without our history and without our politics.

- And that metaphor from the foot of the drain pool is so perfect because, you know, on one hand it shows how the withholding of resources, or in this case, just like fun is.

(both laughing) Happiness, I just don't want you to be happy, becomes an, you know, translates into policy, it becomes an economic thing that you are withholding, but you know, one of the things that you talked about in the book is that you say that the civil rights idea was the civil rights movement in that respect was a victim of its own success, right?

Because like, when you look at brown vs board, they said, you know, we got desegregation, but it almost kind of fueled a more virulent racial animus that was kind of, you know, worse in many respects because it led to the hoarding of these resources.

But I'd like for you to explain to the audience, like why you said that the civil rights movement was kind of a victim of its own success.

- So I'll try a couple different ways.

Well, one is this fact that like nearly knocked me off my chair when I read it.

In 1956 and 1960, two thirds to 70% of white Americans believe that the government ought to guarantee a job for anyone who wanted one and a minimum level of income in the country, nearly 70%.

So for me, as someone who was like trying to get like, you know, a 12% increase in Pell grants for her entire career, the idea that the vast majority of white people were just like give all the money to everybody, you know, like it just it's unthinkable right in our current politics, but that was the case.

And men between 1960 and 1964, there is was a quadrennial survey.

Between 1960 and 1964 support for that idea, government guarantee of a job and minimum income cratered in half, nearly 70% to 35% stayed low ever since.

So first of all, maybe it was a mistake.

Like you just don't see that kind of a swing in, you know, in a four-year survey like that.

But then, you know, I started to piece it together, right?

In 1963, we have the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, which includes those two things as part of the economic demands.

1963, is the year that president Kennedy really associated himself with our media blitz around civil rights.

And of course, we then know that his successor, Lyndon Johnson would after signing the civil rights and voting rights acts become the last Democrat to win the majority of the white vote for president and really politically, you know, once Nixon and the Southern strategy really began to understand that that's how they could reclaim power, and then Reagan sort of put it on steroids with the explicit anti-government layer of the racial resentment, you had the shift and, you know, in some ways I think the logic is clear to me now, right?

This sort of free-market, anti-government ideology that I've certainly grown up in as being the dominant political ideology of the day, you know, was telling white people that they could no longer trust the government which had created their prosperity, government and labor unions.

And I have a whole chapter about how white people sort of abandoned label unions.

But government had gone from the enforcer of the racial hierarchy, right?

It was government who was saying, you may not live here.

You must live here.

Like it was government.

Government went from the enforcer of the racial hierarchy to the offender of the racial hierarchy, in a pretty swift period of time and was a betrayal.

Can you, I mean, just, you know, I think part of writing and part of communicating is to do the thing where you put yourself in the shoes of people who you're trying to explain what they were thinking.

It was like, you told me these people are so bad that I should not drink from the same water fountain with them, live in the same apartment building as them, go to the same school as them, and then now three years later, you're telling me that they are in fact our equals and we should share all these things with them.

So that was a profound betrayal by government.

And then the formula, the political formula then said, so trust the market is really, has been thought of or has been sort of sold as a race neutral idea right.

In the free market it's the content of your character, it's not about the color of your skin, but of course, what is the market if not for the people who have power in that market to shape it?

And who are the people who have power in the market, right?

It's white men, and so it's a move from a government, which is becoming increasingly accountable to a more diverse America into a place where you had there's a similar sort of old concentration of wealth and power as the white supremacist government and...

I'm forgetting what your question was.

Did I answer it?

(laughs) - Yeah, you answered it.

One other thing I'm interested in, and this is just a theory of mine.

- Yeah give me your theory.

- Is this idea of this free market kind of skew toward libertarianism in the past few years, but you know, like we see in the kind of '50s and the '60s the emergence of this idea of the, you know, adherence to the free market and smaller government.

And do you think that emergence was that economic theory and its trickle-down idea emerged out of intellectual pursuit?

Or do you think it was manufactured as like a cover story for what you just talked about?

Because, you know, we've seen like there was no backlash during the new deal and doing all of this stuff in the '30s and '40s, a little bit, but you know, this idea that the government was a separate thing from us, which you perfectly lay out in the book.

Like how we think of the government is doing this versus like that's our money, right.

That didn't exist until, you know, we saw it emerge in the '50s.

Do you think that was a cover story that was created for this idea of racial resentment to fuel this political ideology?

Or do you think it was, you know.

- It's a good question that, you know, I don't know the full answer to, but I'll take a stab.

I mean, the new deal was fiercely opposed by the same people who had brought us the gilded age that, you know, predated it, right?

There was a plutocratic elite that thought it was socialism.

Same rhetoric as today.

And yet they couldn't sell that to the majority of white people, because the majority of white people were like this is the best thing that's ever happened, so shut the hell up.

Do you know what I mean?

Like we have, you know, this is it, right.

This is the formula and, you know, the economic expansion of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, and the ways in which wages tracked productivity, you know, hand in glove, the way that you had ever increasing standards of living, the greatest middle-class the world had ever seen, higher standard living, or, you know, that was the proof and so you had white Americans, you know, basically they weren't buying it.

But I do think that there was always a class of people who were trying to sell this idea.

They sold it and defeated universal healthcare for example, with that kind of socialist red baiting rhetoric and, you know, saying that it was an affront to the American way of life against Harry Truman.

But it just, for the most part didn't work, because I think there were enough business people who were on board, right?

This would afford us approach.

And I think that was made possible by a lack of social distance between, you know, the white guy on the carpet and the white guy on the shop floor.

I mean, there really was a sense that, you know, that was neat, and I think that the extent of social distance that happened in an economy that was becoming more diverse, where you still had mostly white men in power and then more women and people of color and immigrants of color after 1965 and the immigration act, you know, filling the ranks of the working class, there became that social distance allowed the space for the stereotypes, the belief in a hierarchy of human value, and we saw the suppression of the minimum wage and all of that, right.

The middle wage hit, was at its highest right around that sort of fulcrum of the civil rights movement as well.

So I think it's really about the receptivity.

You know I first learned the story of how we got to the inequality era without race.

It was the Powell memo, right?

Which is a memo by a man who would become justice Powell, the Supreme court, who sort of laid out a plan for sort of conservative economic takeover of universities, you know, sort of set the plan for what would become a lot of the right wing infrastructure.

And a lot of the business lobbies sort of put into motion, all right, the '60s, this has gone too far, we need to organize like businesses to be as organized as these protesters were, but there's no race in the Powell memo if I'm not mistaken, right.

You know, I learned the house of what shifted in our economic policy, the tax cuts, the trade policies, right?

The shift in the way that we spend and invest and all of the stagnation of the minimum wage, the assault on labor unions, like all of that, I learned the house, but this journey to write "The Sum of Us" helps me see the why.

Why is it that on pretty much all of these issues that we're talking about white Americans are reliably 20 to 30 percentage points, more economically conservative than our people of color?

And that they even on issues where white folks are more supportive of not more than people of color, but are like, you know, 45, 55% supportive of an idea, whether it's Medicare for all right, which gets like 47% of Republicans.

- It benefits them more, right?

- Right.

White people are the largest group of the uninsured, right.

White people are the largest group of people making under 15, white people, they're a lot of majority in the country.

And yet they still vote into power a party that has no interest in doing anything, and is adamantly opposed to this agenda.

So they vote into power reliably in every presidential election since LBJ, they vote the Republican Party, which has become so conservative on economic issues that there's not even reflective of the economic ideology of its own base.

- A couple other things, I could talk to you about this all day.

What are the things, you know, you point out in the book is this idea of colorblindness in race, neutral policy, as if like, you know, as if the policy was always race neutral, right.

Like I think there's this big debate now about critical race theory and how we shouldn't be teaching, you know, history through the lens of race as if we didn't all learn history through the lens of whiteness, right.

In which is the same, which we could talk about with economic policy.

But I want you to talk about the idea of colorblindness and how it is almost counterproductive to the idea of equity.

- Yeah.

I mean, this is an issue I have to say like many things, you know, my now, you know, almost 15 year dialogue with my law school professor, Ian Hang Lopez has been very instructive.

And I took a course seminar on colorblindness in law school from him.

So colorblindness, obviously...

So that was like the moral language when I was growing up.

The person who was like a really good person was colorblind, and the sense was right, this is what the civil rights movement was aiming for was that we would be judged by the content of our character, that race would no longer matter.

And what is wrong with colorblindness as used, certainly as a legal reading of the constitution, I'll come back to that in a second.

That is where it becomes the bluntest instrument against racial progress, and has by the Supreme court really ever since the mid 1980s, but even normatively, what ends up happening is that because you went from explicitly racist policymaking, right.

Racism holding the pen, you know, goods and services were distributed, as you know, economic power was distributed, as wealth was built and encouraged and subsidized to really own a dime with the bare exception of affirmative action, which has never been as impactful as it is like in the popular imagination.

Really turning on a dime to saying, okay, now we can't see race, which just meant that we can't see racism.

We can't see the ways in which they still shapes opportunity, that is the effect of colorblindness as a strategy and as an ideology.

And then at its worst, that's like at its best.

It sort of ill-equips people to see what's really going on.

See what time it is to talk about identity, which is important to everybody, right.

To have, you know, the muscle to deal with racial difference and conflict, and to be culturally competent and all of that, right.

Then sort of like on an individual, sort of normative moral level colorblindness does not serve.

And then as a reading of the constitution, what it has meant is that, and this is really where John Roberts is the most conservative and the most dangerous in the 63 course.

The most dangerous to, you know, to everything (laughs) is the read that the color, the constitution is color-blind.

And so the constitution does not allow governments to recognize race even to ameliorate racial inequities.

So that is the logic for cutting down, for striking down... Actually, Seattle was one of the cities, right?

Seattle and Louisville, voluntary school integration by like nice white parents who wanted to come together across lines of race and make sure that their children benefited from the, you know, the great educational interest that is diversity.

Because in order to create these systems, to attract students across lines of race, they had to recognize what race the students were, and that was there for, in constitutionally impermissible.

They basically hold up to the same level of scrutiny policies to advance racial justice as policies and treat them like they were policies to segregate and discriminate and oppress.

So that's a problem.

- I think you explained it very well.

Basically if you, like, they took the monster that they created and said, you know, we can't recognize race because people might be racist when they were the ones who were racist.

- That's right.

- I think we need to get to some questions from the audience.

One of the viewers wanted to know that when it comes to important discussions like this equity and equality, and this is one of the, actually one of my original questions, you know, we find it hard to disentangle them from socio-economic status, right?

We always talk about race in terms of poverty.

So this person wants to know what, how important is it to unlink or link these two things?

- Say a little bit more.

- Right.

So if we talk about, for instance, inequality, like any kind of inequality, economic inequality, let's talk about schools for instance.

You know, a lot of times we talk about these schools are unequal because just black communities are poor, and that's why if you go to a school when you're talking about the white community, you're talking about up wealthier (voice breaks out) and that's why the inequality exists and they want to know how important is it to unlink or link these things, link these economic and the social inequalities to poverty, or are they more linked to race?

- Yeah.

So ultimately, you know, it's pretty difficult to unscramble the egg, right?

So the creation of race itself as a concept, the idea that the human race is subdivided and there's a hierarchy of value within the human race was itself a political strategy to justify an economic model of mass exploitation.

So you don't get...

It's the greed that drives you create racism, create race and racism.

And then there are, it's like kaleidoscopic, right?

Like there's so many ways in which it's really difficult to disentangle race from class politically, because class has always been racially understood in the United States, right?

I mean, whether it's, you know, Lyndon Johnson who said something like, and I'm paraphrasing, I should probably memorize this one.

You know, you convince the lowest white man that he's, you know, higher than the highest black men, and he'll empty, you can pick his pocket, he'll empty out all this pocket for you, right?

There's this sense in which that's the sort of like funny LBJ as I'm of it, but in the book I talked to sociologists who have a name for it, and it's called, last place aversion, this idea that you're more concerned with your relative status than your absolute status.

Of course, W.B Dubois called it in "Black Reconstruction" the psychological wages of whiteness.

That in his reading of the moment in the south, you know, white workers and black workers were so, you know, had the same material conditions, nobody owned anything.

And, you know, they were all sharecropping.

And, you know, the economies were...

The industries were deeply exploitative and it was sort of a plantation economy, you know, basically through Jim Crow after reconstruction as well.

And he said, but they hate and fear each other because the oligarchy has offered the psychological wages of whiteness to white people, by giving them a sense of esteem, you know, funding their schools slightly better, you know, making sure that they can serve on juries and basically making them think that they are something like can aspire to or on the side of the upper class.

And that identity projection and that sort of relationship around racial identity is enough to beat any solidarity that they might have with the massive black workers.

And if they had, and in the moment in history, when they did, it was a force so powerful that it could, you know, bring down the whole system.

And yet it was forwarded by this psychological wage instead of contesting for better material wages.

So it's really hard to disentangle race in class.

And you know, I also think, and then on the flip side, I'll just say like one other way in which it sort of refracts together, it's that, you know, so often when we have these economic conversations about the minimum wage, about poverty, about childcare, about health care, white people's read those weather consciously or unconsciously as being for the benefit of black and brown people.

And so you've got a racialization of otherwise economic conversation, even though, as we said, white people are the majority of the uninsured and the impoverished, the majority of people who are aided by antipoverty programs, and, you know, the list goes on and on, and yet media over represents black and brown faces, particularly black faces in poverty depictions.

And there's just this sense that the people for whom it's a group pathology, even though the majority of black people are not poor, but there's this stereotype, the people for whom it's a group pathology and a sort of in better condition, poverty are black people.

And so poverty equates with blackness, which of course lowers many white people's willingness to do something about it.

- Great.

So, and I know this course in a few weeks ago, a proposal to pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people made it to house committee vote for the first time, it's been in proposals since 1989.

It seems like a tiny step, but do you think that reparations will ever be a reality?

And is there anything that you feel, that feels more tangible that might help the country to embrace reparations?

- Thank you.

So I'm a few thoughts on this.

One, you might think that because I'm saying racism has a cost for everyone, but I don't think there should be reparations.

'Cause like everybody suffers for racism.

And so, you know, the ledger is balanced.

Like not now, we're good, right?

So obviously that's not what I communicate in the book.

And I think in fact-- - I think you do though.

- I mean, I communicate in the book that I don't communicate that the ledger is balanced, but I do communicate that it has a cost for everyone.

That you can't have a system as pervasive as racism as in our society, and have people feel like they can escape it, it is (indistinct) every system, but that doesn't mean that in every single instance, it's not hurting black and brown people.

So you can't avoid it, but the harms are concentrated, or the harms or the burdens are not equal.

I think that the zero sum reaction is what's making reparations hard for this country that's so obviously needs them.

The reaction is often, well, why do I have to pay?

Why I'm imitating white person here.

Why do I have to pay?

- In this case we are the white people though.

Like we are paying like nothing that white people will be paying, we won't pay like it's all of our money, right.

- That's what I'm saying.

It's like this weird idea that it's a dollar out of, you know, white person's pocket goes one more dollar to black person's pocket, right?

Like it's gonna be this, like, you know, like, everybody's get up every white, person's got to get up their checkbook.

That is not what it's about.

It's about our government, which is the actor that segregated America, the actor that set the policies in place for slavery and all of that, that has to pay, and that is the government that we all pay into.

We all benefit from.

I mean, and no issues, other, I mean, it's a strange thing where it's like, you know, why should this white person have to pay?

And it's like, we're all paying.

And actually, as you said at the beginning Michael, I see it as an investment.

I see it as seed capital for the America that we're becoming.

I see it as paying a down payment on like a house that can actually stand.

And I don't think it's a radical idea.

I think there are two things that I think would help.

One in the conclusion of the book, help us get there.

And the conclusion of the book, I talk about a process that's underway in a bunch of different communities called truth, racial healing, and transformation, which brings together stakeholders at a grassroots community level to sort of rewrite the community history, get on the same page about, you know, the real racial story of the community, build relationships among, you know, stakeholders and then identify what is the vision for Seattle, or Dallas, or Topeka, that is with free of this old belief in a hierarchy of human value.

What would it really look like if we could just jettison that belief that no longer serves us, it is costing us so much and then moves forward.

I don't think that in our current politics, that's sort of blue ribbon commission in Washington is gonna move the needle politically.

But I left the three years of being on the road to write "The Sum of Us" more certain than ever that organizing like true deep relationship building and struggle with one another, is the most transformational thing.

And that's why I really love the truth, racial healing and transformation idea, because it builds in some of the, kind of, you know, elements of real grassroots organizing and relationship building and common struggle.

So I think that will be necessary to create the kind of social permission for it.

And I also think, you know, something like Senator Booker, you know, baby bonds, right.

Which is like something for everyone, but more for low wealth families and low wealth families are disproportionately black.

And the racial wealth divide is, you know, 15 cents on the dollar and the black college graduate has less wealth than a white high school dropout.

And that's because of history showing up in your wallet and just think about the transformative power of having 20, 30, $40,000 in your pocket, in your bank account, and just what that enables and how much that was a gift to the white and soon to be white Americans in the middle of the last century and how, what was done and, you know, how many businesses were started and, you know, just how many, you know, how much innovation was created because of that.

And I think we need to do that for everyone.

And certainly for the people who were by the force of law deliberately excluded from those opportunities.

So you see my like heat about reparations is really more about like 20th century, wealth building exclusion than it is about slavery, I'm agnostic, like I'm not like it shouldn't be slavery.

I think from here to equality, Sandy Jeremy's book is a great sort of practical.

Here's how it can be done with the 1850 census records.

I don't think it's impossible by any means, but I'm also just like, you know, we don't even have to go back that far to talk about what is owed.

- I agree with you.

One of the things that I've preached for years is that maybe like just the actual value of the money stolen from black taxpayers and given to white people in the new deal, and in the GI bill, that might be like equivalent to all that money from 1778 or 1792 now, right?

Like it might be the equivalent.

Will you talk about all that money and that wealth building that they gave to white people that we paid for?

But of course we could talk about this all day, unfortunately our time is up.

I wanna thank you for a great conversation.

I wanna thank Crosscut for inviting us.

And I wanna thank you for writing this book.

Oh God, this is great.

I think everybody should read it just to have a objective understanding of kind of how this predicament that we're in is not just our burden.

So I wanna thank Crosscut, and thank you all for joining us today.

Thanks for the Crosscut Festival.

Hope you get a chance to see some of our other festivals sessions this weekend.

I'm looking forward to the conversation between the house speaker Pelosi and Judy Woodruff tonight at six.

For now you guys have a great night.